50km for 50k!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; there are a lot of parallels between endurance training and writing a book.
And having hit the 50,000 word mark in my manuscript yesterday during the London Writers’ Salon 24 hour Writing Sprint, I celebrated the milestone with a 50km cycle with my husband this morning around a beautiful bicycle track circling Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok.
The loop is called the Happy & Healthy Bike Lane and consists of a colourful 23km path around the entire airport and along a lovely waterway. We rented two bikes for four hours and realised shortly after we began that the first lap would take us just over the hour to complete. So when deciding how many laps we wanted to put ourselves through, choosing to go for the second and then ride in circles around the car park until we hit the 50km mark, felt like a symbolic way to mark yesterday’s little win.
The event itself was hosted by the London Writers’ Salon (LWS), an online writing community I’ve followed for a few years on social media, who create a virtual, and sometimes in-person, space for writers all over the world to engage in their craft; whether that’s writing a book, an article, journaling, or even academic papers. They also host daily ‘Writers’ Hour’ writing sessions, expert workshops, courses, and interviews with other writers among many other amazing services and events. They even share daily quotes and inspirational ‘Words of Wisdom’ when it comes to the art of writing - ones I save so regularly, I’ve had to create its own Instagram collection!
What I really loved about the event was the structure. A 24 hour Writing Sprint sounds daunting, but it was broken down into hourly chunks. Each sprint began at the top of the hour with a quick 5 minute intro, intention-setting, and some encouraging words of wisdom, then a 45 minute silent writing session, another 5 minute round-down where, if you were in the flow, you were encouraged to keep going, but if you needed a breather to step back and assess the work done, you had 5 minutes for that and then another 5 minute break before the next sprint. They even created a beautiful, downloadable word tracker for everyone to keep track of their hourly word count!
As for me, I never intended to do every hour because for one, I like my sleep, and two, I had my goal heading into the day - hit 50k. That said, I commend the many, many writers from all over the globe who managed to either do the full 24 hours or got damn close to it! It was wonderful to drop in and out throughout the day and see the hundreds of writers from every corner of the world in their 4th, 8th, 16th hour.
For me, it took 11 sprints to reach my goal, broken up throughout the day like so:
Sprint #1 06:00am - 07:00am: 507 words
Sprint #2 07:00am - 08:00am: 539 words
Sprint #3 08:00am - 09:00am: 632 words
Sprint #4 09:00am - 10:00am: 550 words
Sprint #5 11:00am - 12:00pm: 837 words
Sprint #6 12:00pm - 01:00pm: 980 words
Sprint #7 01:00pm - 02:00pm: 303 words
Sprint #8 04:00pm - 05:00pm: 1,299 words
Sprint #9 05:00pm - 06:00pm: 552 words
Sprint #10 08:00pm - 09:00pm: 864 words
Sprint #11 09:00pm - 10:00pm: 274 words
Total for the day: 7,337 words
Manuscript total: 50,068 words
Now, do I think this is a sustainable daily writing routine? Absolutely not. But, I often find my attention span wanes quite quickly when writing and I either get up every few minutes to make another cup of tea, look for a snacky snack, or doom-scroll for absolutely no reason other than I think we’re just so used to being stimulated from multiple sources at any given time that we find it difficult to focus on just one thing.
Or maybe that’s just me!
But I found that with the short 45 minutes of focused writing yesterday, I managed to get a decent amount of words down without feeling the need to reach for the phone, or the kettle, or the fridge(!), and without feeling mentally drained afterwards either, knowing I had a set break coming up before heading into the next sprint.
The event was invaluable for this reason alone and I will definitely be adopting this strategy as I finish out this first draft:
Focus on the next part rather than the whole. For now, at least.
As we made our way around the track this morning, the distance markers sprayed on the tarmac every 250m served as a reminder of watching the (sometimes painfully slow) increase in word count when setting out to write a whole book. With every word closer to 50,000 yesterday (and ultimately 80-90k for the novel itself) and every kilometer closer to 50 this morning, I found myself engaging in the same mental bargaining:
“I’ll take a quick break after 500 words.” - “We’ll rest at 5km to have a quick drink.”
“500 words down, just another 500 to hit the next thousand.” - “14.5km. Just another 500m and that’s 15km.”
As the saying goes, how do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
Massive thank you again to the London Writers’ Salon - already looking forward to the next one!
Oh, and any thoughts on how to celebrate hitting 60k?!
